The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, September 4, 2023

Notebook: It’s Labor Day of course. But what does that mean, other than the occasional sale (which doesn’t mean much anymore, with the world turned over to Amazons), the obligatory grill, the boozing and day off we can all, supposedly, use. So in the interest of the real Labor Day, let’s address a few ought-to-be correctives. First, this day should really fall on May 1, along with the rest of the world’s commemoration. But it’s too Socialist for this country, too worker-centered. So America-first’s Congress chose to go its own way in 1894, when it considered laborers a subspecies. It was the Haymarket Square massacre in Chicago, after all–the massacre conservatives typically refer to as a “riot,” that dog-whistle of a word always intended to dehumanize the participants, even those who are killed and truncheoned–that led to the designation of the day in one of those fleeting moments of remorse. Recall: laborers had demonstrated at Haymarket Square in favor of an 8-hour day, rather than the endless shifts they were forced to work in those days of Lochner and glory. The forgettable but cruel, union-busting Grover Cleveland (“while the people should patriotically and cheerfully support their Government,” he had said in his second inaugural address, “its functions do not include the support of the people”)  designated that same year the first Monday in September as Labor Day, a “legal public holiday,” like Christmas, New Year’s, and what was then Feb. 22, May 31 and still is July 4. But it was very quickly co-opted by the forces of dehumanization, literally. It became not a day to celebrate the worker for his and her sake alone, as workers, as people, as individuals, but as workers who benefit the welfare of the country, a recalibration away from the individual summed up in the way even Biden’s Labor Department describes, with not a hint of irony and a torrent of unspoken disdain for the worker, the meaning of the holiday: “American labor has raised the nation’s standard of living and contributed to the greatest production the world has ever known and the labor movement has brought us closer to the realization of our traditional ideals of economic and political democracy. It is appropriate, therefore, that the nation pays tribute on Labor Day to the creator of so much of the nation’s strength, freedom, and leadership – the American worker.” It’s not for the worker that we celebrate Labor day, but for what the worker achieved, for what luxuries the worker provided, for the ends the worker–the means to our end–provided. This approach is no different than what happened at Bunnell Elementary last month, where Blacks were turned into objects, instruments, mules, to the school’s purpose: raising scores (raising that “standard of living,” as applied to schools). It is enslavement a few steps removed, a reduction of individual human beings to cogs, a refusal to recognize the individual, the worker, for who the worker is, for what the worker does, full stop. Not for what that work provides (beyond what it provides the worker and the worker’s family). It is, in other words, an amoral recasting of the worker as a thing. The recasting was complete when labor Day somewhere along the line became what every website retracing the history of the day says it is: the marker of the end of summer, when Americans celebrate… something. Essential workers maybe? That patronizing way of the Covid years of thanking life-savers with a little applause, a few signs and a few daily pot-bangings, so we don’t have to pay them what they’re worth or give them more than two weeks’ time off a year, max–or fire them when they call out one too many times? So remember your fellow-workers–not the white-collar nine-to-fivers, who need no remembrance and whose work is more like money-making leisure, but working-class workers, the ones who make life possible and enjoyable, usually at their life’s expense, the ones paid shitty wages and given shittier benefits if any, the ones slaving to get food to your table, to get your garbage picked off the streets (as you yell and scream that they tumbled your precious garbage can the wrong way), to get your meds dispensed the right way and your diapers off of you on time–yours, old men and women, not your children’s, though there are those too. And of course be sure to spit on the City Council next time a council member dares suggest that maybe, just maybe, we ought to pay more attention to affordable housing for our most stressed workers. Happy Labor Day.

—P.T.

 

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Q: An employee is fired by employer. Must the employer pay severance pay at the time she or he fires the employee?
A: No. The employer has until the next regularly scheduled payday to pay. Florida has many branch offices and outlets of out-of -state corporations. It would be impossible for many companies to issue a check in a day. This is true also of many Florida-based companies.
Q: People say, “Florida is a ‘right to work’ state.” What does that mean?
A: Article 1, Section 6, of the Florida Constitution states simply that people may work whether or not they join a labor organization, recognizes collective bargaining, and prohibits public employees from striking.
Q: Several of my employees converse with each other in a foreign language which most employees do not understand. This is rude and makes for hard feelings. Can I prohibit employees from speaking in a foreign language in our factory?
A: Yes, but let me make a suggestion. Why don’t you take a few minutes and let the employees discuss the problem? It might well be that the non-English speakers do not know this is offensive to other employees.
Q: It is more economical for me to require employees to work overtime than to hire a new employee and pay benefits, but one of my employees says it is against the law to require someone to work overtime. Can I require someone to work overtime?
A: Yes. Your employee is simply misinformed.
Q: How many days of vacation and holiday leave must I give my employees under Florida law? Does federal law differ?
A: There are no Florida or federal laws that require a business to give vacation or holiday leave.
Q: As a State of Florida employee I have wondered why we don’t go on strike for higher wages. My colleague said if we did, we would be fired. Could we be fired for striking?
A: Yes. Article 1, Section 6 of the constitution is quite clear. The last sentence in the article states simply, “Public employees shall not have the right to strike.”

–From a Q&A on the Florida labor department’s webpage in the early 2000s.

The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.